Crazy John in the wilderness

A very jewish way: The Gospel of John  •  Sermon  •  Submitted
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Overview of the Gospel of John, using Logos, on How to Study the Bible

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Crazy John in the wilderness- the guy who ate bugs and stuff

John the Baptist

Now you may have guessed it but we are talking about John the Baptist today!
From all of this it should be clear that Jesus regarded his ministry as in continuity with, and bringing to a climax, the work of the great prophets of the Old Testament, culminating in John the Baptist, whose initiative he had used as his launching-pad.
N. T. Wright
Now that we know what we are studying next year:
Ephesians
Spiritual Beings
Denominational History and Beliefs
Malachi/Galatians/Romans
it puts me at freedom to prepare us for that and allows us to use this as the baseline, which is truly a gift.
So let’s dive into the next portion of the text:
John 1:19–34 NIV
19 Now this was John’s testimony when the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem sent priests and Levites to ask him who he was. 20 He did not fail to confess, but confessed freely, “I am not the Messiah.” 21 They asked him, “Then who are you? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the Prophet?” He answered, “No.” 22 Finally they said, “Who are you? Give us an answer to take back to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” 23 John replied in the words of Isaiah the prophet, “I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way for the Lord.’ ” 24 Now the Pharisees who had been sent 25 questioned him, “Why then do you baptize if you are not the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?” 26 “I baptize with water,” John replied, “but among you stands one you do not know. 27 He is the one who comes after me, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.” 28 This all happened at Bethany on the other side of the Jordan, where John was baptizing. 29 The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! 30 This is the one I meant when I said, ‘A man who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’ 31 I myself did not know him, but the reason I came baptizing with water was that he might be revealed to Israel.” 32 Then John gave this testimony: “I saw the Spirit come down from heaven as a dove and remain on him. 33 And I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water told me, ‘The man on whom you see the Spirit come down and remain is the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.’ 34 I have seen and I testify that this is God’s Chosen One.”
So our mission should we choose to accept it, is to make sense of this.
One tactic that I have been taught is to break down the section based on how you would shoot a movie as a director.
So overall, we are talking about a guy name John the Baptist, so after an epic opening kind of like the Star Wars opening of the scrolling text, the opening scene is a guy, his name is John.
Scene:
It recounts a conversation John has with some people (who they are we will discuss later).
End Scene
Next Scene:
John sees Jesus walking and decides to exclaim He is a piece of livestock from God and that has some relation with sin and then he must apparently be talking to some other people around saying, see see, this is the guy I have been talking about.
End Scene
Next Scene:
John tells a story about what he witnessed about Jesus and then what he thinks it all means.
End Scene.
This technique is helpful to break apart narratives to see what is going on. Sometimes you will read something and go…what in the world did I just read. This helps to answer that question.
Does anyone have any questions so far?
So the basic flow we have is this:
Seeing
This is asking the who, what, when, where why
Understanding
What does this mean, considering what we learned above, what is happening.
It is in this step we have to consider cultural contexts, history etc
This is the step where we ask, what does this passage say about God, Man, Original Audience.
Sharing
What truth/wisdom is being conveyed to me the modern reader, based off of what was meant and learned in the previous two steps
Responding
This is the step where after we have examined the text we need to respond to it, there could be emotions.
The passage could be asking us to do something, how would we implement that?
3. This is the time for reflective based questions.
Now depending on how large your passage is, the scope or range that you do your study analysis should vary. For today we will just do the passage that is up above. It is best to do a whole “scene” like I described above that way you can get the arc of what the author is trying to convey in the different “scenes”

Seeing

We need to identify who the main players are in this story.
John the Baptist
Jewish Leaders
Priests
Levites
Messiah
Elijah
The Prophet
Isaiah the Prophet
Pharisees
Jesus
Lamb of God
Israel
Holy Spirit
That is a lot of people, with almost no explanation of who they are, the author just assumes we will know. So who are these people?
John the Baptist:
Jesus’ cousin
Nazarite (vow) not Nazarene
He was a prophet
We could do a whole study on him alone but this step is just saying who it is
Jewish Leaders
Now there were at the time many “leaders” this term is not meant to cast the jews negatively, but like we talked about they are portrayed as the main opposition to Jesus and His ministry.
These leaders could have been a ruling counsel like the sanhedrin or more likely temple leaders like the Sadducees.
Priests
People who offered the sacrifices everyday at the temple and were ministers of God. Had to have specific lineage to be a priest.
Levites
The levites were the priestly tribe, but what this will refer to are the people who were not actively priests but assisted with temple running. Think facilities and maintenance people. Still have to be of a certain lineage (literally the tribe of “Levi”)
Messiah

Messiah. A title that means “anointed one.” In the OT “anointed one” refers to Israel’s king (see, e.g., 2 Sam 1:14; see also 1 Sam 16:1–13), priest (see, e.g., Lev 4:3; see also Exod 29:7), and patriarchs in their role as prophets (see Ps 105:15; see also 1 Kgs 19:16). Jesus is the anointed king, priest, and prophet par excellence.

MESSIAH (מָשִׁיַח, mashiyach; “anointed” or “an anointed one”; “messiah”). Rendered into Greek as Χριστός (Christos), cognate to the verb χρίω (chriō, “to anoint”). In this sense, it is essentially the same to say that Jesus is the “Messiah,” or the “Christ.” In contemporary Bible translations, the former is sometimes used when the term is functioning as a title (the Messiah) and the latter when the term is functioning as a name (i.e. Jesus Christ).

a. Messiah is then a title, now it is a very charged title, with a lot of meaning, but in the most literal sense it is for the anointed rulers of Israel, their Kings and Priests
6. Elijah
The Jewish New Testament Commentary Yochanan (John), Chapter 1

Are you Eliyahu? That is, are you the Prophet Elijah, who is to come before the Great Day of Adonai, according to Malachi 3:23(4:5)? See notes at Mt 11:10, 14; 17:10, where Yeshua makes clear that Yochanan the Immerser is not Eliyahu reincarnated but does come in his spirit for those who will accept him.

7. The Prophet
The Jewish New Testament Commentary Yochanan (John), Chapter 1

Are you the prophet? That is, are you the “prophet like me” whom Moshe promised would come to the people of Israel, and whom they were to heed (Deuteronomy 18:15, 18)? For more, see Ac 3:22–23&N.

8. Isaiah
a. Prophet is the former kingdom, big scroll in the middle of your Bible
9. Pharisees
The Jewish New Testament Commentary Mattityahu (Matthew), Chapter 3

P˒rushim and Tz˒dukim (plural; singular Parush, Tzadok), “Pharisees and Sadducees.” These were the two main factions of the religious establishment in Yeshua’s time. In 586 B.C.E. Babylon conquered Judea and Jerusalem, laid waste the First Temple, which King Solomon had built, and deported the ruling classes to Babylon. With the Temple, the sacrifices and the cohanim no longer functioning, the Jews in exile and after their return seventy years later sought another organizing principle on which to center their communal life. They found it in the Torah (the “Law”; see 5:17N), as can be seen already in the report of the reading of the Torah by Ezra (Nehemiah 8). The earliest students, developers and upholders of the Torah seem to have been of the hereditary priestly caste—Ezra himself was both a cohen and a sofer (“scribe”). But later, as the cohanim were drawn back into caring for the sacrificial system as it developed during the Second Temple period, a lay movement which supported the Torah and favored its adaptation to the needs of the people arose and began to challenge the authority of the cohanim. The cohanim and their backers in the first century C.E. were known as Tz˒dukim, after the cohen gadol appointed by King Solomon, Tzadok (his name means “righteous”; compare 6:1–4&N, 13:17&N).

Meanwhile, under the Maccabees in the second century B.C.E. those whose main concern was not the sacrifices but the Torah were called Hasidim. (Except for the name, which means “pious ones,” there is no connection between these and the various Orthodox Jewish communities that follow the teachings spread by the talmidim of the seventeenth-century Eastern European teacher and mystic known as the Ba˓al Shem Tov.) The successors to the Hasidim were known as P˒rushim, which means “separated ones,” because they separated themselves from worldly ways and worldly people. These P˒rushim not only took the Tanakh to be God’s word to man, but also considered the accumulated tradition handed down over the centuries by the sages and teachers to be God’s word as well—the Oral Torah—so that a system for living developed which touched on every aspect of life.

In Yeshua’s day the Tz˒dukim tended to be richer, more skeptical, more worldly, and more willing to cooperate with the Roman rulers than the P˒rushim. However, the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. ended the viability of the Tz˒dukim by destroying the venue of their chief responsibility; and whatever tradition they may have developed has for the most part been lost. See Ac 23:6&N.

The P˒rushim and their successors were then free to develop further their own received tradition and make it the center of gravity for Jewish life everywhere. Eventually, due to the dispersion of the Jewish people, which separated many from the living flow of tradition, these oral materials were collected and written down in the Mishna (220 C.E.), under the editorship of Y’hudah HaNasi (“Judah the Prince”). The rabbis’ discussions about the Mishna during the following two or three centuries in the Land of Israel and in Babylon were collected to form the Jerusalem and Babylonian Gemaras. Combined with the Mishna these constitute the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds.

Centuries of Christian preaching have made the English word “Pharisee” virtually a synonym for “hypocrite” and “stubborn legalist”—witness the entry for “pharisaical” in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary:

“Resembling the Pharisees especially in strictness of doctrine and in rigid observance of forms and ceremonies; making an outward show of piety and morality but lacking the inward spirit; censorious of others’ morals or practices; formal, sanctimonious, self-righteous, hypocritical.”

While it is true that Yeshua himself lambasted “you hypocritical Torah-teachers and P˒rushim” for having many of these traits (see chapter 23 and 23:13N), Christians often forget that his hard words were delivered in a family context—as a Jew criticizing some of his fellow Jews. A glance at any modern Jewish community newspaper will show that Jews are still critical of each other and willing to endure such criticism—reproof and rebuke are normal and acceptable behaviors in many Jewish settings. However, Yeshua does not take his fellow Jews to task for being Pharisees but for being hypocrites—the former does not imply the latter. Moreover, Yeshua’s criticism was not of all P˒rushim but only of those who were hypocritical. While some Pharisees were insincere or overly concerned with externals, others were “not far from the Kingdom of God” (Mk 12:34), and some entered it and became followers of Yeshua without ceasing to be P˒rushim (Ac 15:5). In fact Sha’ul said before the Sanhedrin, “Brothers, I myself am a Parush”—“am,” not “was” (Ac 23:6).

Because of the subconscious negative associations most people have with the English word “Pharisee,” the JNT text uses the original Hebrew words “Parush” (singular) and “P˒rushim” (plural), and for the sake of parallelism substitutes “Tzadok/Tz˒dukim” for “Sadducee/Sadducees.”

10. Jesus
This whole study is about Him
11. Lamb of God
The Jewish New Testament Commentary Yochanan (John), Chapter 1

God’s lamb. Yochanan identifies Yeshua with the dominant sacrificial animal used in connection with Temple ritual, and particularly with the sin offerings, since he is the one who is taking away the sin of the world. Elsewhere in the New Testament Yeshua the Messiah is equated with the Passover lamb (1C 5:7&N). The figure of the lamb connects Yeshua with the passage identifying the Messiah as the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53 (Ac 8:32); and his sacrificial death by execution on a stake is compared with “that of a lamb without a defect or a spot” (1 Ke 1:19), as required by the Torah (e.g., Exodus 12:5, 29:1; Leviticus 1:3, 10; 9:3; 23:12). In the book of Revelation Yeshua is referred to as the Lamb nearly thirty times. On God’s requiring a human sacrifice for sins, see 1C 15:3N, MJ 7:26–28N, and indeed the entire book of Messianic Jews.

12. Israel
The name of the Jewish nation after our forefather Jacob who was renamed Israel which means to wrestle with God. Usually used when referencing the faithful Israel.
13. Holy Spirit
Third person of the Trinity, again a whole study could be done here.
That is a lot just figuring out who the players are in this story, how are we doing? Any Questions?
We have already discussed What is happening based on our scenes exercise earlier
When?
About the time of Jesus’ public ministry about 30ish AD +- a few years
Where?

This all happened at Bethany on the other side of the Jordan, where John was baptizing.

Why leads us into our next section.

Understanding

So this asks what is going on here?
What are your thoughts so far?
Open table discussion
What do you think the author is trying to communicate by putting this story in here?
Think a celebrity that everyone would have known, why would you not have referenced him. Everyone knew about John the Baptist.

Sharing

Responding

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